The Worm in Every Heart

“Could be,” I allowed. “Why? Something I should know about?”

She still didn’t look up. Picking and choosing. When you see so much, all at once, it must be very confusing to have to concentrate on any one particular sliver of the probable—to decide whether it’s here already, or already gone, or still yet to be. Her eyebrows crept together, tentative smears of light behind her lenses, as she played with her braid, raveling and unraveling its tail.

“ . . . something,” she repeated, finally.

We started across, only to be barely missed by a fellow traveller from the Pacific Rim in a honking great blue Buick, who apparently hadn’t yet learned enough of North American driving customs to quite work the phrase “pedestrian always has the right of way” into his vocabulary. I caught Carra’s arm and spun, screaming Cantonese imprecations at his tail-lights; he yelled something back, most of it lost beneath his faulty muffler’s bray. My palms itched, fingers eager to knit a basic entropic sigil—to spell out the arcane words that would test whether or not his brakes worked as well as his mouth, when given just the right amount of push on a sudden skid.

I felt Carra’s hand touch mine, gently.

“Leave it,” she said. “It’ll come when it comes, for him. And believe me—it’s coming.”

“Dogfucker thinks he’s still in Kowloon,” I muttered. Which actually made her laugh.

* * *

But we got back just a minute or two later than my watch claimed we would, and the nurse was already there—waiting for us, for her, behind a big, scratched wall of bulletproof glass.

Needle in hand.

* * *

After which I went straight home, through this neat and pretty city I now call my own—even though, having long since defaulted on my student visa, I am actually not supposed to be anywhere near it, let alone living in it. Straight home to (surprise!) Chinatown, just below Spadina and Dundas, off an unnamed little alleyway behind the now-defunct Kau Soong Clouds In Rain softcore porno theatre, whose empty storefront is usually occupied by either a clutch of little old local ladies selling baskets full of bok choi or a daily-changing roster of F.O.B. hu

stlers hocking anything from imitation Swiss watches to illegally-copied Anime videotapes.

Next door, facing Spadina, the flanking totem dragons of Empress’ Noodle grinned their welcome. I slipped between them, into the fragrant domain of Grandmother Yau Yan-er, who claims to be the oldest Chinese vampire in Toronto.

“Jude-ah!” She called out from the back, as I came through the door. “Sit. Wait.” I heard the mah-jong tiles click and scatter under her hands. It was her legendary Wednesday night game, played with a triad of less long-lived hsi-hsue-kuei for a captive audience of cowed and attentive ghosts, involving much stylish cheating and billions of stolen yuan—garnished, on occasion, with a discreet selection of aspiring human retainers willing to bet their blood, their memories or their sworn service on a chance at eternal life.

Grandmother Yau’s operation has been open since 1904, in one form or another. She’s an old-school kind of monster: Lotus feet, nine inch nails, the whole silk bolt. One of her ghosts brought me tea, which I nursed until she called her bet, won the hand with a Red Dragon kept up her sleeve, and glided over.

“Big sister,” I said, dipping my head.

“Jude-ah, you’re insulting,” she scolded, in Mandarin-accented Cantonese. “Why don’t you come see me? It’s obvious, bad liars and tale-tellers have got you in their grip. They have slandered my reputation and made even fearless men like you afraid of me.”

“Not so. You know I’d gladly pay a thousand taels of jade just to kiss you, if I thought I’d get my tongue back afterwards.”

“Oh, I’m too old for you,” she replied, blithely. “But you’ll see—I have the best mei-po in Toronto, a hardworking ghost contracted to me for ninety-nine hundred years. Good deal, ah? Smarter than those British foreign devils were with Hong Kong. We will talk together, she and I, and get you fixed up before I get bored enough to finally let myself die, with a good Chinese marriage to a good Chinese . . . ”

She let her voice trail away, carefully, before she might have to assign an actual gender-specific pronoun to this mythical “good Chinese”—person.

“I don’t think I could afford your mei-po’s fees,” I pointed out, tucking into my freshly-arrived plate of Sticky Rice With Shrimp And Seasonal Green. To which she just smiled, thinly—patted my wrist with one clawed hand—and went back to her game, leaving me to the rest of my meal.

A fresh ghost brought me tea more, bowing. I bowed back, and sipped it, thinking about Toronto.

Hong Kong was everything my Ryerson fuck-buddies ever thought it would be—loud, bright, fast, unforgiving. When I was five years old, my au pair took me out without calling the bodyguards first; a quarter-hour later, I buried my face in her skirt as some low-level Triad thug beat a man to pulp right in front of us, armed only with a big, spiky, stinky fruit called a dhurrian. Believe me, the experience left an impression.

In Toronto, the streets are level, the use of firearms strictly controlled, and swearing aloud is enough to draw stares. Abusive maniacs camp out on every corner, and passersby step right over them—quickly, quietly, without rancor or interest. It’s a place so clean that U.S. movie crews have to import or manufacture enough garbage to make it pass for New York; it’s also North America’s largest centre for consensual S & M activity. But if you stop any person on the street, they’ll tell you they think living here is nothing special—nice, though a little boring.

The truth is, Toronto is a crossroads where the dead congregate. The city goes about its seasonal business, bland and blind, politely ignoring the hungry skins of dead people stalking up and down its frozen main arteries: Vampires, ghouls, revenants, ghosts, wraiths, zombies, even a select few mage’s golems cobbled haphazardly together from whatever inanimate objects came to hand. There’s enough excess appetite here to power a world-eating competition. And you don’t have to be a magician or a medium to recognize it, either.

“Dead want more time,” Carra told me, long after yet another drunken midnight, back in her mother’s house—both of us too sloshed to even remember what a definite article was, let alone try using it correctly. “’S what they always say. Time, recognition, remembrance . . . ”

Trailing off, taking another slug. Then fixing me, with one blood-threaded eye. And half-growling, half-projecting—so soundlessly loud she made my temples throb with phantom pain—

“Want blood, too. Our blood. Yours . . . mine . . . ”

. . . but don’t mean we gotta give it to ’em, just ‘cause they ASK.